The New International Aid Architecture and the Triangular Cooperation for Development: Opportunities, Challenges and Risks

A country internationally recognized as a rising economic power and example of success in the implementation of public policies in the areas of health, education and agricultural development, and one that is seeking to enhance its political status, Brazil is a major promoter (SEBID, 2001) of South-South international cooperation for development (ICD). A cooperation modality to which the literature (Aylon, 2013), associates: noninterference in internal affairs; respect for national sovereignty; absence of externally imposed conditionalities on the country for receiving aid, as well as respect for its historical and cultural singularities. In the field of international cooperation, the continuing financial pressures on the traditional donor countries, associated with the believe that economically emerging countries with expertise in South South Cooperation (SSC) would hold a broader and more comprehensive perspective on the processes and mechanisms demanded for successful aid policies and, also, with the difficulties presented by the Least Developed Countries (LDC) to meet the Millennium Goals, have led traditional economic powers,  such as Japan, United States, German and France,  to establish triangular cooperation partnerships (TCP) for promoting the development of LDC, with emerging countries having experience in SSC, such as Brazil. Although presented as a “benefit”, insofar as it would represent a complement and adopt the principles of SSC (Lopes, 2010), there is no guarantee that TCP will enable balanced relationships between partner countries (Alonso et al., 2011). By means of a theoretical approach, the present article aims at providing a comprehensive overview of opportunities and risks of Triangular Cooperation for Development in the scene of the New International Aid Architecture, which has its foundation on the Paris Declaration (2005), which represents the acknowledgement of the ineffectiveness of the North-South Cooperation (NSC) modality (Carrion, 2012).